This might help some, along with zinervadonella's suggestions (and I have a feeling a lot of us wouldn't know how to accomplish what you suggested, though--you might need to give more detailed instructions for us non-techy-types). I haven't tried them, because I finally have a computer with good graphics and I wanted to play the game with those maxed out. It does look cool.

My save times, while noticeably increasing in Chinatown, didn't approach anything close to 3 minutes, thank goodness, but I have 2 GB of Ram on my laptop so that likely was a big factor in keeping the times down. I keep autosave on and live with the lag myself since it saved my butt more than once.

Quote:

1.Enable the console. To do this, right-click on the game shortcut and choose
properties.Then add the " -console" command (without the quotes) where it
says "target" , so it will look something like this:
"c:\...\Vampire - Bloodlines\vampire.exe" -console
You can then push the "~" key while in the menu to bring down the console
and add your commands there if you like, though I would recommend you to edit
the config files as I say below and not add manually the commands each time.
The in-game console should be used mostly for testing.

2.The game needs a page file of at least 1.5GB. If you have 1GB of RAM or
higher your page file will probably be just right, If you have lower than
1GB of RAM you should change it to at least 1.5GB.To change the page file go
to : properties-> advanced-> performance-> settings-> advanced-> virtual
memory-> change.

3.To make the game manage the memory better you need to add the command:
[ -heapsize xxxxxx] to your game shortcut.
Where xxxxx stands for half of your current ram in kb. So if you currently
have 1GB of ram you should put : 512000
Open the properties of the shortcut and add the command so that it looks like
this: "C:\...\Vampire - Bloodlines\vampire.exe" -console -heapsize 500000

4.GO to : [installation folder]...\Vampire\cfg\ and you'll find the config.cfg
file. Open it using notepad and change the following commands to:

5.Your next step is to create an autoexec file in the same folder as the
config.cfg to add some more useful commands.All you have to do is open
notepad , type the commands and save it as autoexec.cfg (beware not
autoexec.cfg.txt !). The game will automatically find the autoexec.cfg file
and run it.So the commands are the following: